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Normally I'd refrain from doing such optimisations, but I am stuck with Overleaf's time limits on a project with a lot of relevant tables.

Are there some possibilities to make tabularray's tblr and longtblr environments faster?

Are there some constructions that make those environments particularly slow and that are better avoided?

Creating the tables once as graphics to be included is not really an option because the contents of the tables may change while the document is revised.

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    you can keep the tables as separate documents in the project and re-run them on edit so including them as pdf seems a viable option. (the other option is probably pay to get longer timelimit)
    – David Carlisle
    Commented Oct 8, 2021 at 16:33
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    Another option is to store the table in a separate project, then share the output of the project into your main document project. You'll need to "Refresh" the file in the main project when it changes in the separate project though. This may or may not be an acceptable trade-off for you. The approach is similar to what could be done for large TikZ/pgfplots graphics: overleaf.com/learn/latex/Questions/…
    – Paul Gessler
    Commented Oct 8, 2021 at 19:44
  • (remark) Unfortunately, despite the nice features, tabularray is quite slow for larger tables (on my machine, 400 table entries take 4-5 seconds)
    – user202729
    Commented Nov 28, 2021 at 5:54
  • I am experiencing serious lag issues with tabularray too. None of my tables have more than 6 or 7 rows and columns, but there are quite a few of these, resulting in a build time of well over 2 minutes (and frequent things going wrong with @writefile that simply seem to be caused by the amount of time it is taking to build). I've no choice but to revert to tabular as it is becoming unworkable.
    – rbrignall
    Commented Apr 12, 2022 at 15:27
  • @DavidCarlisle can you explain step by step what you mean by your comment? Maybe post it as an answer?
    – Toivo Säwén
    Commented Sep 26, 2023 at 16:13

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Are there some possibilities to make tabularray's tblr and longtblr environments faster? Are there some constructions that make those environments particularly slow and that are better avoided?

  1. Don't use X columns, since they cause tabularray to measure all cells for another time.
  2. Don't use multicolumn cells, since they cause tabularray to measure all cells for another time.
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    but X columns and multicolumns are precisely the reason people use tabu and are forced to tabularray now, whose slowness compared to tabu is utterly ridiculous for technical documents
    – mirabilos
    Commented May 25, 2023 at 0:23
  • For anyone curious about replacing X columns, you can use e.g. Q[t,wd=0.1\textwidth] to replicate them with a set width (replace 0.1\textwidth with the relevant column width)
    – Toivo Säwén
    Commented Sep 26, 2023 at 16:25
  • @ToivoSäwén the idea of X columns is to precisely not do that…
    – mirabilos
    Commented May 26 at 22:22
  • @mirabilos yes, but if it causes the compilation to time out you might be looking for a work-around (I was at the time of my comment)
    – Toivo Säwén
    Commented May 27 at 7:43
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We deal with Overleaf time limits currently by splitting the whole document in subfiles (using the so-named package, and bibunits in addition) and compiling the whole document locally. This allows the distributed contributors to work on their respective parts and keeping an eye on the whole document at the same time.

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